Is Conservatism Just a Business?

What would the conservatives do without the liberals? Would they still be in business? Not as conservatives. Without liberals there are no conservatives.

Both liberal and conservative leaders, on average, make money at it. Bureaucrats certainly make money as a result of promoting the liberal agenda — rule-by-expert. But so do conservatives who also believe in rule-by-expert as long as the experts are their own, e.g. really smart business guys like Roger Ailes.

It was liberals who first turned government, and therefore liberalism itself, into a business. All of this assumes that politics, especially modern democratic politics (which does not actually let the people directly control the ambient culture and is therefore not really democratic) is always and everywhere an industry with alternative markets, alternative consumers. The liberal politician and bureaucrat have a constituency. They provide products and services to their customers — the welfare class and every secularist who wants to feel good about himself without participating in a more traditional religion like Christianity. There is almost no attempt at this point in American history, on the part of liberal politicians like Al, Bill, or Hillary, to hide the extent to which liberalism is a very profitable industry for its leadership and executives. They deemphasize how profitable it is for their customers.

Utility in the conservative market is summarized in lower taxes — a shrinking or static financial burden on the conservative executive’s customers as a result of suppressing liberalism. The other form of utility demanded by this market is a more traditional society. The problem for the conservative businessman as politician/pundit/talk show host/network stockholder/network manager/etc. is that these two kinds of demand are essentially negative. The conservative market wants less government and less artificial, coercively instituted culture. The problem with negative demand — the demand for less of something — is that the market disappears if there is not plenty of what the negative market does not want. Conservatism, as a business, cannot destroy the suppliers of what the conservative constituency wants LESS of. If the conservatives are not “compassionate”, if they do not eschew aggression, if they do not adopt strategies and tactics which are designed to fail by degree (avoiding any possibility of substantially destroying liberalism) then they cannot stay in business to supply, so to speak, less of what the liberals produce.

Now Liberalism can, in fact, be destroyed completely by simply separating the state from all of the means of cultural production, starting with education. But the conservative businessman, by which I mean the business of conservatism, has never gotten serious about this radical change. Not so curiously, the industry of conservatism has never gotten truly serious about destroying its host. Its market is created by the business of liberalism.

By contrast, liberalism could survive without conservativism because its demand is positive, not negative. It relies on the positive demand of parasites for the wealth of others, acquired by turning the government into a criminal enterprise so they do not themselves have to engage in overt criminal activity to transfer the wealth of others to themselves. Notice that conservatives rarely, if ever, have the guts to put it this way. This kind of rhetoric would put them out of business. The “positive” demand for “positive freedom” (‘the positive power and capacity to have and to do’ as it has been classically put) simply involves this transfer of what there has to be plenty of — wealth. And so in the long run liberals are careful not to kill the host upon which the parasites live. Conservatives need only wait for liberal industry to recognize that it is arriving at a limit over which an increase in tyranny would undermine its power to engage in any tyranny. Conservatism is a useless epiphenomenon of liberalism. Its feedback to the primary business of liberalism is ancillary; merely supplementary to the whole system, the whole industry, of politics.

Because conservativism, as an industry, cannot survive without liberalism (making conservatism and liberalism one and the same industry), the conservatives, in spite of their industrial strength, must be bypassed by the people in pursuit of the total destruction of liberalism. Conservatism, as an industry, has become irrelevant to our goal of actually ending liberalism and progressivism. Along with the liberals and progressives the conservatives denounce us as radicals for our serious intent, for our overt plan to abandon the industry of conservativism, to become militant and spiritually violent. We just see them as irrelevant cowards petrified by the loss of hegemony leading to a loss of profits.

Those of us who no longer call ourselves conservatives and who are serious about the total destruction of liberalism and progressivism as cultural artifacts, are a new, third traditional force in American politics. I call this force “Neopopulism” and I have written about it here on www.sonsoflibertymedia.com and in several books mentioned below in my bio. The heart and soul of the Neopopulist form of life is orthodox Christianity combined with an explicit technical, philosophical theory of meaning, reason, and knowledge which is postmodern and pragmatic. After all, it was William James, an American philosopher, who spoke of our “right,” not just our “will,” to believe, and trashed progressive, scientistic rationalism at the turn of the last century. Neopopulism views James as a postmodern thinker, along with G. K. Chesterton, on the pro-Christian side of western culture. Nietzsche, more less a contemporary, is a good example of a postmodern thinker on the anti-Christian side.

Liberal progressivism, as rationalism (as the phony proponent of the universality of its reason), is morally corrupt and authoritarian. It is finally compatible with Margaret Sanger assuming the rationality of genocide. It is compatible with mass abortion. It is, by its very nature, evil and anti-Christian. The conservative industry will not assert this. Businesses avoid spiritual violence.

It is us orthodox Christians, who reject Burke’s supernatural vision of the state and the liberal’s naïve utilitarianism (rationalism), who can and will destroy progressivism as the world’s alternative and completely phony version of salvation history. The Christian Neopopulist position is that the orthodox church is the chief competitor of the state, the primary means of social construction, and must explicitly dominate the culture by insisting on the private ownership and control, by the people, of all of the means of cultural production — all of education, policy-making science, the media, the courts (through the election of judges), immigration policy (through the power to directly veto the government in referendums). People will be free to build their atheist, progressive private schools and assert their rationalist social policy. But both conservatives and liberals know that once the people recognize that both modern science and the government are just competing metaphysical traditions, and take back complete control of the culture, liberalism, and its parasite, conservativism, are dead as businesses.

Join the fight today by adopting the Christian Neopopulist goal — the total destruction of liberal progressivism as a viable cultural artifact. This is a third trimester abortion. Understand, that along the way, you must abandon and will then destroy, the conservative industry, just as you will be destroying the liberal industry. This is a project for adults, for radicals, for the passionate, for serious human beings. This is not for people who have reduced the cultural and political struggle to business.

We will find out if Donald Trump, precisely because he does not need the conservative industry, is prepared to engage in the destruction of it and the liberal industry. He must destroy the latter in order to destroy the former. We will see, perhaps soon, if he simply wants to found a new Trump political industry based on unthinking deference to progressive themes. He can avoid this mistake, by simply reasserting democracy as the control, by the people, of all of the instruments of cultural production.

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